NY - Staten Island Living Breakwaters project wins international adaptation award
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Staten Island’s “Living Breakwaters” project received international acclaim this month as the winner of the 2023 Obel award, which recognizes outstanding architectural contributions in service of both people and the planet.
The $107 million resiliency effort, located off the South Shore of Staten Island, spans 2,400 linear feet across eight separate breakwaters. They are designed to blunt the force of powerful waves churned up by storms while promoting habitat for marine life living in New York’s waters.
An innovative infrastructure project, the breakwaters have fostered nearly a decade of educational engagement with Staten Island schools — bringing citizen science to the borough, leveraging ongoing work with the Billion Oyster Project and offering an up-close example of environmental engineering.
“Winning an architecture prize is important for a project like this, which involved so many different people working together with a shared purpose,” said Kate Orff, founder of SCAPE, the New York-based multi-disciplinary team that designed and led the project, in a statement. “It is a true encouragement for community members, elected officials, landscape architects, ecologists, and engineers, to come together and develop coastal adaptation projects wherever they are.”
Orff said the award also serves as an acknowledgment of the importance of approaching design in a holistic way that considers wider, planetary implications.
“Our protective natural systems are in various stages of decline globally, and in order to repair them, we have to think and design systemically to tie the pieces back together,” Orff said. “It’s an incredibly bold, creative act. Hopefully, this award can emphasize this point: that nature is a matter of design now and that we have to work fast, and to work together.”
The project was born out of the Rebuild by Design competition launched by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) after Superstorm Sandy, which brought devastating, deadly storm surge that hit Staten Island with such force that it dislodged houses from their foundations.
Its design utilizes massive stones and ecological concrete on top of marine mattresses — rectangular-shaped baskets made of high-strength mesh that sit against the ocean floor and distribute the breakwaters’ weight. The smallest of the eight breakwaters is 11 feet from floor to crest; the largest is about double that size.
Multiple reef ridges then extend outward from each breakwater to invite marine life, including seals, to the waters off Staten Island. Conceptually utilizing nature, experts said oysters latching on to the structures will strengthen its ability to protect Staten Island’s shore in the coming years.
A total of 800 pre-cast tide pools and 500 armor blocks will have been placed when the project, long-delayed in its initial planning stages, marches toward the finish line next year. Afterwards, temporary resiliency measures on Tottenville’s coast — sandbags that line the shoreline — will be removed and replaced by the placement of tons of new sand.
